Let's Play Catch-up

I've been busy! I've been on holiday, and have loads to post about, but before that, I need to catch up with some smaller things that have happened.

Let's start at the end of May, when we went to see Belle & Sebastian at The Roundhouse. I bought the tickets as a Valentine's Day gift, so it was a long wait for the actual romantic night out! They're one of L's favourite bands, so they made a perfect gift; and this was my 3rd gig in the venue, which I really do like.



Next up, a trip to the zoo. Late! In the summer they open the doors in the evening to adults only, allowing you to spend the end of the day looking at animals, with a drink and a bite to eat. Talking of eating, I think the burger I had was the best part of the evening. The zoo started closing the animal houses and sectioning off the park way earlier than I would have expected, so I was rather disappointed to be ushered away from areas before I had even seen half of the zoo. Still, they had a cool penguin area, and who doesn't love marching penguins?



We then had a small workmate gathering one weekend to say "cheerio" to one of our team. David (middle of the below pic), headed back to Spain a few weeks ago now - a thoroughly nice guy who could never quite work out my Scottish accent. We headed to "Queen's Skate and Bowl", where you can, clearly, do both of those things. And also drink, eat, and partake in karaoke. Interesting venue! We didn't sing, but did try and regain our skating legs.



There was one final catch-up before the holiday, where I headed to the homeland to catch-up with my Dad. I hadn't seen him since November, which is very sad. But he has a new job, which is happy news! I'm quite proud of him really; laid off from his engineering job which he's had or changed for at least a couple of decades, he decided to go back to college and finish his career in an area really enjoys: nature! And what better way to illustrate this than post a picture of him crawling after a blackbird?



Whilst up there, we took a trip to his "office" - Kailzie Gardens in the Scottish Borders! It's most famous for having a live feed to a family of nesting ospreys out in the woods. Dad's the project head of "KLAWED", where he's aiming to attract both more wildlife and visitors to the area. He's really excited about it, and so am I! It's a very pretty place, even in the rain.



So, now I'm pretty much caught up... except for the two summer trips: Glastonbury Festival and the big ol' jaunt to the USA. More to follow, promise!

Lovely Construction

Our office is high up. Really high up. For London anyway. We moved in back in September after a massive amount of growth; both in reputation and in staff numbers. Almost immidiately, we realised we would need a new space; so we've taken the shell next door.

The view is equally amazing in both. To our wonderful sights across the Thames, towards St Pauls, the Eye and beyond, ie this:



we are adding this:



The office starts as an empty shell, so we have to kit it out. It started out just like this:



We did an amazing job in the first room; with glass meeting rooms; a tonne of flat-screen TVs showing the states of our systems; and modern, spacious desks. This one will be no exception; though it is to be catered towards the Engineers (like me!). This means more screens. Ridiculously large, flat screens from Samsung:



Seriously; these things are soooo sexy. 55 inch screen, 1 inch thick. We have a series of smaller screens too, though constructing their wall-mounts seems to be causing our Infrastructure guys some headaches:



We also have entire wall, floor-to-ceiling whiteboards. Essentially walls with special paint which you can draw on with whiteboard markers, and it washes right off. Pretty nifty! Oh, and we'll also have an arcade. Yes. An arcade. With at least 9 proper retro 80s machines, fresh from bidding wars on eBay. These ones were moved into the room whilst we carpeted the arcade room and painted it black.



It's nearly finished, but I'm off on holiday! So I will post the results up in a few weeks; hopefully everything will be fully constructed, and super-sexy. Then it's on to building the new New York City office...